Airplanes Suck Sometimes
by magickalgirls
Summary: Levi hates flying. Usually. Modern AU. Posted as part of RivaMika Week on Tumblr as a "Chance Encounter." I don't own these characters and all mistakes are my own. About 1.4k workds. [MikasaxLevi]


Levi hated flying on airplanes. The giant hunks of metals were impending doomsday machines that would fall onto the earth and create a chaos almost equivalent to discovering your next door neighbour was a cannibal and you were the next victim. As lovely as the idea of being among clouds or stars, and witnessing cascading mountains as he flies by seems more than ideal, the drying air inside the aircraft, noisy children, and snoring adults frequently made it a less than favorable experience. The in-flight entertainment was usually terrible; he didn't care for popular cinema. Not to mention, they had the audacity of calling that piss ass of hot leaf juice, tea.

He was flying to France in hopes to find inspiration for his dissertation in his former home. The city of romance to many, but to Levi it was a city of haunting memories and a life he no longer desired to live in. He was writing his dissertation on ex-patriot literature in France, focused on the Lost Generation of writers. World War I was a war of senseless murder. This generation of souls failed to realize that life can be cruel but failure to trudge along would consume a soul entirely. A disillusioned heart only makes one forget the feeling of being alive. He believed them to be unintended comedic relief. He walked down the aisle of the aircraft searching for his seat, 34E. On his way down, he saw five couples with newborns, nine children, and eighteen business professionals. _Tch, this is not going to go well, _he thought to himself. It was the final three hour stretch into France, but nonetheless, the flight from Japan has been anything less than favorable.

He found his seat and settled in. The seat next to him was already occupied by a sleeping raven-haired girl with a red scarf around her neck. _Well, at least she won't be a bother _he thought, glancing to his left. The girl had left the shutter open. He could see the sun starting to set.

"Good afternoon passengers, this is Lisa, one of your flight attendant for today's flight to France. Approximate travel time is three hours. Please watch the following video regarding emergency evacuation and safety procedures."

Levi was half-attentive. It's not as though he'd heard that two more times earlier that day. When the video finished, Levi took out a novel from his laptop bag. The cover read, _À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs_ by Marcel Proust. He had last read the novel when he left France, it only seemed fitting to revisit the novel now that he was returning back.

Two hours had passed when he decided he was finished with the novel. He glanced to his left; the raven-haired girl was still sleeping. He gazed outside the window and it was much brighter than earlier, reasonable considering that he was travelling into an earlier time zone.

"Merde," he muttered under his breath, involuntarily remembering that he had to choose undergraduates from the university to be his research assistants by tonight. He opened his laptop and clicked on the file of applicant resumes. It was an unusually large applicant pile he had to sort through for only one position available.

He glanced through the files, deleting applications from students with anything less than a 3.75 grade point average. A few of the applicants seemed a little odd, but he kept the group with the grades. This left him a nice group of eight students. He quietly rapped his knuckles against his laptop; Reading through the applicants, he felt disappointed at the lack of creativity and ingenuity in the applicants. _Some lot of Literature majors they are,_he judged. He opened the next file. _Ah, this one was one of the deviant types, _he realized looking at the resume.

Mikasa Ackerman, second year student. She had no declared major, rather, it listed Intended Comparative Literature and Integrative Biology. As a first year, she worked closely with two other faculty members with the Titan Project, a research project pertaining to genetic mutations in animals that enlarged them to three times their usual size that the university had garnered quite some notoriety for. She had 3 semesters worth of academic units listed in both biology and literature classes. She excelled in all of them, earning only one A- in Honors French. She was fluent in Japanese and English._She's interesting, _he said reflecting on what he had seen. He looked through the pdfs in search of the required professor recommendations. He read them, the words "prodigy," "genius," and "unlike any other student I have ever had" rolling sweetly off the tongue of his internal monologue. Despite her age, he decided that no other applicant would compare in potential talent and used the in-flight wi-fi right then and there to email her congratulations.

At that moment, his in-flight partner had shuffled and woken up. She yawned and stretched her arms upwards. She fixed a red scarf wrapped around her neck and looked at Levi.

She noticed the novel that sat at the edge of his laptop and commented, "I love that novel. Proust is a genius."

Levi studied her, not expecting such a dulcet voice to escape her mouth. While the only discernible features earlier were her black hair and red scarf, he could see that she was attractive. Her skin was a creamy ivory and her lips seemed as though they were stained by cherry blossoms. Her eyes seemed to match her hair, but they were eyes like charcoal – eyes that would be ignited by passion and come alive. In short, she was an enigmatic beauty.

"You've read Proust?" he inquired, shocked to have met someone who read the novel.

"I read _Du côté de chez Swann _for one of my classes and fell in love with his prose, so I read the rest of the series. I'm very much interested in the idea of how time works and how our memories lapse. It's a shame that he's only remembered for the madeleine scene though. I thought his fierce love for the hawthorns was more memorable," she spoke calmly, staring at the cover of the novel.

From there, they started talking about novels and they eventually delved into their personal lives. She talked about her rambunctious adoptive brother and his genius childhood best friend. When the flight attendants came by to offer them a complimentary drink, Levi complained to her about the shitty airplane tea and she agreed with his comments. He mentioned his favorite tea house.

"Wait, do you mean the one owned by this cute elderly couple, ooh, what are their names?"

"The Akimitos?"

"Yes! That one! I've only been there once and it was back when I was a kid but their oolong tea could easily be my madeleine experience."

Levi was smitten. She seemed perfect, her only visible fault being her young age. She was well-spoken and intelligent. He wondered where she was headed when his thoughts were interrupted.

"My phone is in my other bag, do you mind telling me the time?" she asked.

Levi gave the girl an odd look.

"We're mid-air. I don't know the time-zone to answer it correctly," he articulated, semi-annoyed at the shift in conversation.

"How long have we been in air?" she questioned.

"About two hours and forty minutes if I've been keeping track correctly," he stated in a steady voice.

"Okay, thank you—," she paused, "I'm sorry, what's your name?"

"Levi," he answered.

"Thank you, Levi."

She shifted her view to the window.

"And yours?"

"Mikasa. Mikasa Ackerman."

A ring sounded and the flight attendant spoke, "Passengers, please put on seatbelts and remain seated for the duration of the flight. We will soon be landing. It is 6 in the afternoon here in Paris. Thank you for choosing us for your travel needs."

Levi wondered whether it was the same Mikasa Ackerman he was about to spend the next year working with.

Mikasa scrambled through a small carry-on bag she had under her seat. She took out her wallet, readying to power on her phone. Levi peered over and saw her student ID in her wallet.

_Merde._


End file.
